North Korea's Disregard for Human Life

In recent weeks, North Korea has rattled its sabers with more menace. In addition to a recent nuclear test, the hermit kingdom may possess mid-range nukes. More such tests are scheduled in the near future. It’s a threat so worrisome that even Barack Obama suddenly became an advocate for a strong missile defense system. But lost in this high diplomatic drama is the nation’s threat to life. North Korea measures the value of a human life by how much it can help the state.

Just today, North Korea sentenced naturalized U.S. citizen Kim Dong Chul to 10 years of hard labor after Kim allegedly confessed he was a spy for the U.S. and South Korean governments. Last month, U.S. student Otto Warmbier, 21, was captured for attempting to bring a propaganda sign back home. It’s all an effort by North Korea to exert leverage upon the United States.

But let’s not forget the case of David Sneddon. While hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province of China in 2004, Sneddon disappeared. The Chinese government first told Sneddon’s family he likely fell into a river while hiking and died. But eyewitness testimony emerged saying Sneddon completed his trek. A crazy theory emerged: Sneddon, who spoke both Korean and English, could have been captured by the North Korean government in order to train its intelligence community.

In February, Sens. Orrin Hatch, Deb Fischer, Ben Sasse and Marco Rubio introduced aresolution directing the State Department and U.S. intelligence to more vigorously investigate what happened to Sneddon, who would currently be 35 years old. Circumstantial evidence points to the theory Sneddon is still alive. First, the Chinese government is known to help North Korean police, even capturing and sending back North Koreans who try to flee the country. Second, North Korea has abducted foreigners ever since the 1970s to make them teach its intelligence community language and customs they could better use to spy. North Korea even did this with a U.S. soldier who deserted to the country in the 1960s. In this case, Sneddon was regarded by North Korea as more than just a political pawn. His language skills made him more valuable to the communist state, and if it captured him, they wouldn’t be telling.

Army Keeps Soldier Who Beat Child Rapist

National Security Desk · Apr. 29, 2016

Turns out the U.S. Army will not remove Sgt. First Class Charles Martland from service. In January, the Army planned on punishing the Green Beret because he slammed to the ground an Afghani police commander in 2011 after he discovered the man had abducted and raped a child. Because he violated the U.S. policies on respecting Afghan culture, rapey bits and all, Martland was going to be kicked out of the military March 1.

But thanks to inquiries by Rep. Duncan Hunter, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan himself as a Marine, the Army decided to retain Martland. Hunter said, “The Army did the right thing and we won — the American people, won. Martland is who we want out there.” As for Martland himself, he simply and humbly said he was thankful for being able to continue to serve.

Hillary Is a Dangerous Neocon Warhawk

Hillary Is a Dangerous Neocon Warhawk

Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon

The argument over whether Hillary Clinton is a neocon may have been settled by her hawkish debate performance on Thursday, which followed her Israel-pandering speech before AIPAC, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

If there were any doubts that Hillary Clinton favors a neoconservative foreign policy, her performance at Thursday’s debate should have laid them to rest. In every meaningful sense, she is a neocon and – if she becomes President – Americans should expect more global tensions and conflicts in pursuit of the neocons’ signature goal of “regime change” in countries that get in their way.

Beyond sharing this neocon “regime change” obsession, former Secretary of State Clinton also talks like a neocon. One of their trademark skills is to use propaganda or “perception management” to demonize their targets and to romanticize their allies, what is called “gluing white hats” on their side and “gluing black hats” on the other.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

So, in defending her role in the Libyan “regime change,” Clinton called the slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi “genocidal” though that is a gross exaggeration of Gaddafi’s efforts to beat back Islamic militants in 2011. But her approach fits with what the neocons do. They realize that almost no one will dare challenge such a characterization because to do so opens you to accusations of being a “Gaddafi apologist.”

Similarly, before the Iraq War, the neocons knew that they could level pretty much any charge against Saddam Hussein no matter how false or absurd, knowing that it would go uncontested in mainstream political and media circles. No one wanted to be a “Saddam apologist.”

Clinton, like the neocons, also shows selective humanitarian outrage. For instance, she laments the suffering of Israelis under crude (almost never lethal) rocket fire from Gaza but shows next to no sympathy for Palestinians being slaughtered by sophisticated (highly lethal) Israeli missiles and bombs.

She talks about the need for “safe zones” or “no-fly zones” for Syrians opposed to another demonized enemy, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, but not for the people of Gaza who face the wrath of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Yes, I do still support a no-fly zone [in Syria] because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and have some place that they can be safe,” Clinton said. But she showed no such empathy for Palestinians defenseless against Israel’s “mowing the grass” operations against men, women and children trapped in Gaza.

In Clinton’s (and the neocons’) worldview, the Israelis are the aggrieved victims and the Palestinians the heartless aggressors. Referring to the Gaza rocket fire, she said: “I can tell you right now I have been there with Israeli officials going back more than 25 years that they do not seek this kind of attacks. They do not invite the rockets raining down on their towns and villages. They do not believe that there should be a constant incitement by Hamas aided and abetted by Iran against Israel. …

“So, I don’t know how you run a country when you are under constant threat, terrorist attack, rockets coming at you. You have a right to defend yourself.”

Ignoring History

Clinton ignored the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which dates back to the 1940s when Israeli terrorist organizations engaged in massacres to drive Palestinians from their ancestral lands and murdered British officials who were responsible for governing the territory. Israeli encroachment on Palestinian lands has continued to the present day.

A map showing Israeli settlements in the Palestinian Territories.

But Clinton framed the conflict entirely along the propaganda lines of the Israeli government: “Remember, Israel left Gaza. They took out all the Israelis. They turned the keys over to the Palestinian people. And what happened? Hamas took over Gaza. So instead of having a thriving economy with the kind of opportunities that the children of the Palestinians deserve, we have a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in from Iran and elsewhere.”

So, Clinton made clear – both at the debate and in her recent AIPAC speech – that she is fully in line with the neocon reverence for Israel and eager to take out any government or group that Israel puts on its enemies list. While waxing rhapsodic about the U.S.-Israeli relationship – promising to take it “to the next level” – Clinton vows to challenge Syria, Iran, Russia and other countries that have resisted or obstructed the neocon/Israeli “wish list” for “regime change.”

In response to Clinton’s Israel-pandering, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who once worked on an Israeli kibbutz as a young man, did the unthinkable in American politics. He called out Clinton for her double standards on Israel-Palestine and suggested that Netanyahu may not be the greatest man on earth.

“You gave a major speech to AIPAC,” Sanders said, “and you barely mentioned the Palestinians. … All that I am saying is we cannot continue to be one-sided. There are two sides to the issue. … There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders. (NBC photo)

But in Hillary Clinton’s mind, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is essentially one-sided. During her speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last month, shedepicted Israel as entirely an innocent victim in the Mideast conflicts.

“As we gather here, three evolving threats — Iran’s continued aggression, a rising tide of extremism across a wide arc of instability, and the growing effort to de-legitimize Israel on the world stage — are converging to make the U.S.-Israel alliance more indispensable than ever,” she declared.

“The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever and more determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries and to advance our shared values. … This is especially true at a time when Israel faces brutal terrorist stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks at home. Parents worry about letting their children walk down the street. Families live in fear.”

Yet, Clinton made no reference to Palestinian parents who worry about their children walking down the street or playing on a beach and facing the possibility of sudden death from an Israeli drone or warplane. Instead, she scolded Palestinian adults. “Palestinian leaders need to stop inciting violence, stop celebrating terrorists as martyrs and stop paying rewards to their families,” she said.

Then, Clinton promised to put her future administration at the service of the Israeli government. Clinton said, “One of the first things I’ll do in office is invite the Israeli prime minister to visit the White House. And I will send a delegation from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs to Israel for early consultations. Let’s also expand our collaboration beyond security.”

Pleasing Phrases

In selling her neocon policies to the American public, Clinton puts the military aspects in pleasing phrases, like “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.” Yet, what she means by that is that as President she will invade Syria and push “regime change,” following much the same course that she used to persuade a reluctant President Obama to invade Libya in 2011.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy (Photo credit: Office of the President of France)

The Libyan operation was sold as a “humanitarian” mission to protect innocent civilians though Gaddafi was targeting Islamic militants much as he claimed at the time and was not engaging in any mass slaughter of civilians. Clinton also knew that the European allies, such as France, had less than noble motives in wanting to take out Gaddafi.

As Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal explained to her, the French were concerned that Gaddafi was working to develop a pan-African currency which would have given Francophone African countries greater freedom from their former colonial master and would undermine French economic dominance of those ex-colonies.

In an April 2, 2011 email, Blumenthal informed Clinton that sources close to one of Gaddafi sons reported that Gaddafi’s government had accumulated 143 tons of gold and a similar amount of silver that “was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency” that would be an alternative to the French franc.

Blumenthal added that “this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.” Sarkozy also wanted a greater share of Libya’s oil production and to increase French influence in North Africa, Blumenthal wrote.

But few Americans would rally to a war fought to keep North Africa under France’s thumb. So, the winning approach was to demonize Gaddafi with salacious rumors about him giving Viagra to his troops so they could rape more, a ludicrous allegation that was raised by then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who also claimed that Gaddafi’s snipers were intentionally shooting children.

With Americans fed a steady diet of such crude propaganda, there was little serious debate about the wisdom of Clinton’s Libyan “regime change.” Meanwhile, other emails show that Clinton’s advisers were contemplating how to exploit Gaddafi’s overthrow as the dramatic moment to declare a “Clinton Doctrine” built on using “smart power.”

On Oct. 20, 2011, when U.S.-backed rebels captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him, Secretary of State Clinton couldn’t contain her glee. Paraphrasing a famous Julius Caesar quote, she declared about Gaddafi, “we came, we saw, he died.”

But this U.S.-organized “regime change” quickly turned sour as old tribal rivalries, which Gaddafi had contained, were unleashed. Plus, it turned out that Gaddafi’s warnings that many of the rebels were Islamic militants turned out to be true. On Sept. 11, 2012, one extremist militia overran the U.S. consulate in Benghazi killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton honor the four victims of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, at the Transfer of Remains Ceremony held at Andrews Air Force Base, Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Sept. 14, 2012. [State Department photo)

Soon, Libya slid into anarchy and Western nations abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. President Obama now terms the Libyan fiasco the biggest mistake of his presidency. But Clinton refuses to be chastened by the debacle, much as she appeared to learn nothing from her support for the Iraq invasion in 2003.

The Libyan Mirage

During Thursday’s debate – instead of joining Obama in recognition of the Libyan failure – Clinton acted as if she had overseen some glowing success: “Well, let me say I think we did a great deal to help the Libyan people after Gaddafi’s demise. … We helped them hold two successful elections, something that is not easy, which they did very well because they had a pent-up desire to try to chart their own future after 42 years of dictatorship. I was very proud of that. …

“We also worked to help them set up their government. We sent a lot of American experts there. We offered to help them secure their borders, to train a new military. They, at the end, when it came to security issues, … did not want troops from any other country, not just us, European or other countries, in Libya.

“And so we were caught in a very difficult position. They could not provide security on their own, which we could see and we told them that, but they didn’t want to have others helping to provide that security. And the result has been a clash between different parts of the country, terrorists taking up some locations in the country.”

But that is exactly the point. Like the earlier neocon-driven “regime change” in Iraq, the “regime change” obsession blinds the neocons from recognizing that not only are these operations violations of basic international law regarding sovereignty of other nations but the invasions unleash powerful internal rivalries that neocons, who know little about the inner workings of these countries, soon find they can’t control.

Yet, America’s neocons are so arrogant and so influential that they simply move from one catastrophe to the next like a swarm of locust spreading chaos and death around the globe. They also adapt readily to changes in the political climate.

That’s why some savvy neocons, such as the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, have endorsed Clinton, who The New York Timesreported has become “the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes.”

Kagan told the Times, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Now with Clinton’s election seemingly within reach, the neocons are even more excited about how they can get back to work achieving Syrian “regime change,” overturning Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and – what is becoming their ultimate goal – destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia and seeking “regime change” in Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)

After all, by helping Assad bring some stability to Syria and assisting Obama in securing the Iranian nuclear deal, Russian President Vladimir Putin has become what the neocons view as the linchpin of resistance to their “regime change” goals. Pull Putin down, the thinking goes, and the neocons can resume checking off their to-do list of Israel’s adversaries: Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.

And what could possibly go wrong by destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia and forcing some disruptive “regime change”?

By making Russia’s economy scream and instigating a Maidan-style revolt in Moscow’s Red Square, the neocons see their geopolitical path being cleared, but what they don’t take into account is that the likely successor to Putin would not be some malleable drunk like the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin but, far more likely, a hardline nationalist who might be a lot more careless with the nuclear codes than Putin.

But, hey, when has a neocon “regime change” scheme veered off into a dangerous and unanticipated direction?

A Neocon True-Believer

In Thursday’s debate, Hillary Clinton showed how much she has become a neocon true-believer. Despite the catastrophic “regime changes” in Iraq and Libya, she vowed to invade Syria, although she dresses up that reality in pretty phrases like “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.” She also revived the idea of increasing the flow of weapons to “moderate” rebels although they, in reality, mostly fight under the command umbrella of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

Clinton also suggested that the Syria mess can be blamed on President Obama’s rejection of her recommendations in 2011 to authorize a more direct U.S. military intervention. “Nobody stood up to Assad and removed him,” Clinton said, “and we have had a far greater disaster in Syria than we are currently dealing with right now in Libya.”

In other words, Clinton still harbors the “regime change” goal in Syria. But the problem always was that the anti-Assad forces were penetrated by Al Qaeda and what is now called the Islamic State. The more likely result from Clinton’s goal of removing Assad would be the collapse of the Syrian security forces and a victory for Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State.

Journalist James Foley shortly before he was executed by an Islamic State operative, known as Jihadi John.

If that were to happen, the horrific situation in Syria would become cataclysmic. Millions of Syrians – Alawites, Shiites, Christians, secularists and other “infidels” – would have to flee the beheading swords of these terror groups. That might well force a full-scale U.S. and European invasion of Syria with the bloody outcome probably similar to the disastrous Iraq War.

The only reasonable hope for Syria is for the Assad regime and the less radical Sunni oppositionists to work out some power-sharing agreement, stabilize most of the country, neutralize to some degree the jihadists, and then hold elections, letting the Syrian people decide whether “Assad must go!” – not the U.S. government. But that’s not what Clinton wants.

Perhaps even more dangerous, Clinton’s bellicose rhetoric suggests that she would eagerly move into a dangerous Cold War confrontation with Russia under the upside-down propaganda theme blaming tensions in Eastern Europe on “Russian aggression,” not NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 which ousted an elected president and touched off a civil war.

That coup, which followed neocon fury at Putin for his helping Obama avert U.S. bombing campaigns against Syria and Iran, was largely orchestrated by neocons associated with the U.S. government, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife), Sen. John McCain and National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman.

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)

After the violent coup, when the people of Crimea voted by 96 percent to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the U.S. government and Western media deemed that a “Russian invasion” and when ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine rose up in resistance to the new authorities in Kiev that became “Russian aggression.”

NATO on the Move

Though President Obama should know better – and I’m told that he does know better – he has succumbed this time to pressure to go along with what he calls the Washington “playbook” of saber-rattling and militarism. NATO is moving more and more combat troops up to the Russian border while Washington has organized punishing economic sanctions aimed at disrupting the Russian economy.

Hillary Clinton appears fully onboard with the neocon goal of grabbing the Big Enchilada, “regime change” in Moscow. Rather than seeing the world as it is, she continues to look through the wrong end of the telescope in line with all the anti-Russian propaganda and the demonization of Putin, whom Clinton has compared to Hitler.

Supporting NATO’s military buildup on Russia’s border, Clinton said, “With Russia being more aggressive, making all kinds of intimidating moves toward the Baltic countries, we’ve seen what they’ve done in eastern Ukraine, we know how they want to rewrite the map of Europe, it is not in our interests [to reduce U.S. support for NATO]. Think of how much it would cost if Russia’s aggression were not deterred because NATO was there on the front lines making it clear they could not move forward.”

Though Clinton’s anti-Russian delusions are shared by many powerful people in Official Washington, they are no more accurate than the other claims about Iraq’s WMD, Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops, the humanitarian need to invade Syria, the craziness about Iran being the principal source of terrorism (when it is the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks and other Sunni powers that have bred Al Qaeda and the Islamic State), and the notion that the Palestinians are the ones picking on the Israelis, not the other way around.

However, Clinton’s buying into the neocon propaganda about Russia may be the most dangerous – arguably existential – threat that a Clinton presidency would present to the world. Yes, she may launch U.S. military strikes against the Syrian government (which could open the gates of Damascus to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State); yes, she might push Iran into renouncing the nuclear agreement (and putting the Israeli/neocon goal to bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran back on the table); yes, she might make Obama’s progressive critics long for his more temperate presidency.

But Clinton’s potential escalation of the new Cold War with Russia could be both the most costly and conceivably the most suicidal feature of a Clinton-45 presidency. Unlike her times as Secretary of State, when Obama could block her militaristic schemes, there will be no one to stop her if she is elected President, surrounded by likeminded neocon advisers.

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?’]

By Robert Parry

The Poisonous Tree

The Poisonous Tree

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

Andrew P. Napolitano on its totalitarian fruit.

Would all of our lives be safer if the government could break down all the doors it wishes, listen to all the conversations it could find and read whatever emails and text messages it could acquire? Perhaps. But who would want to live in such a society?

To prevent that from happening here, the Framers ratified the Fourth Amendment, which is the linchpin of privacy and was famously called by Justice Louis Brandeis “the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” He wrote those words in his dissent in the first wiretapping case to reach the Supreme Court, Olmstead v. the United States, in 1928.

Roy Olmstead had been convicted for bootlegging on the basis of words he used in overheard telephone conversations. Because he had used a phone at his place of work that the government had tapped without breaking and entering his workplace, the high court ruled — despite the fact that the government had not obtained a warrant — that he had no right to privacy. Brandeis dissented.

Over time, the Brandeis dissent became the law. The Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of all in our “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” was interpreted to cover telephone conversations and eventually emails and text messages. So today, if the government wants information contained in those communications, it needs to obtain a search warrant, which the Fourth Amendment states can only be given by a judge — and only upon a showing of probable cause of evidence of a crime contained in the communications it seeks.

If the government does not obtain a search warrant and listens to phone conversations or reads emails or text messages nevertheless and attempts to use what it heard or read to acquire other evidence or directly in the prosecution of a defendant, that is unlawful. That type of information is known as the fruit of the poisonous tree.

Evidence procured that is the fruit of the poisonous tree has been inadmissible in federal criminal prosecutions in the United States for the past 100 years and in state criminal prosecutions for the past 50 years.

Until now.

Now comes the super-secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reaffirmed by Congress last year under the so-called USA Freedom Act. Beware the names of federal statutes, as they often produce results that are the opposite of what their names imply; and this is one of them.

Congress has unconstitutionally authorized the FISA court to issue search warrants on the basis of governmental need — a standard that is no standard at all because the government can always claim that it needs what it wants. The FISA court does not require a showing of probable cause for its warrants, because it accepts the myth that the government is listening to or reading words by foreign people for foreign intelligence purposes only, not for prosecutorial purposes.

Never mind that Congress cannot change the plain meaning of the Constitution. Never mind that the Fourth Amendment protects all people in the United States, American or foreign, from all parts of the government for all purposes, not just criminal prosecutions.

Yet the FISA court still grants general warrants — look where you wish and seize what you find — exposing our innermost thoughts to the prying eyes of the intelligence community in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment.

Enter the USA Freedom Act. One of its selling points to Congress was that it would permit the FISA court to appoint a lawyer to challenge hypothetically some of its behavior. The court recently made such an appointment, and the lawyer appointed challenged the policy of the National Security Agency, the federal government’s domestic spying agency, of sharing data it acquires via the unconstitutional FISA warrants with the FBI. She argued that the data sharing goes far beyond the stated purpose of the FISA warrants, which is to gather foreign intelligence data from foreign people, not evidence of domestic crimes of anyone whose emails might be swept up by those warrants.

The challenge revealed publicly what many of us have condemned for years: The NSA actually makes its repository of raw data from emails and text messages available for the FBI to scour at will, without the FBI’s obtaining a warrant issued by a judge pursuant to the Fourth Amendment.

In an opinion issued in November but kept secret until last week, the FISA court rejected the hypothetical challenge of its own appointee and ruled that the NSA could continue to share what it wants with the FBI.

There are several problems with this ruling. The first is the hypothetical nature of the challenge. Federal courts do not exist in a vacuum. They do not render advisory opinions. They can only hear real cases and real controversies involving real plaintiffs and real defendants, not hypothetical ones as was the case here.

The whole apparatus of hypothetical challenge and a hypothetical ruling is constitutionally meaningless. It was the moral and legal equivalent of a law school moot court oral argument. Yet federal and soon state law enforcement will interpret it as giving cover to the NSA/FBI practice of data sharing, which is clearly unconstitutional because it is the use of fruit from a poisonous tree.

FISA and the USA Freedom Act were enacted under the premise — the pretense — that the data collected under them would be used for foreign intelligence purposes only so that attacks could be thwarted and methods could be discovered. Yet the use by the FBI of extraconstitutionally obtained intelligence data for ordinary criminal prosecutions defies the stated purposes of the statutes and contradicts the Fourth Amendment.

If this is keeping us safe, who or what will safeguard our freedoms? Who will keep us safe from those who have sworn to uphold the Constitution yet defy it?

US Troops Responsible For Murdering 45 In Hospital Bombing Given Counseling As A “Punishment”

After bombing a Doctors Without Borders (Médicins Sans Frontières, MSF) hospital in Afghanistan — and shooting at terrified victims as they fled the chaos, and then attempting to cover up its role in the tragedy — the Pentagon is refusing to press charges against any of the 16 service members found to be responsible.

Following a six-month Pentagon investigation, those 16 service members were found culpable in the attack in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 3, last year that left 42 patients, staff members, and civilians dead. According to the Los Angeles Times:

The 16 found at fault include a two-star general, the crew of an Air Force AC-130 attack aircraft, and Army special forces personnel, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal investigation.

One officer was suspended from command and ordered out of Afghanistan. The other 15 were given lesser punishments: Six were sent to counseling, seven were issued letters of reprimand, and two were ordered to retraining courses.

Immediately following the attack, MSF — an international medical humanitarian organization — issued several statements with telling first-hand accounts of the madness that ensued during and after the repeated bombing.

“Many staff describe people being shot, most likely from the plane, as people tried to flee the main hospital building that was being hit with each airstrike. Some accounts mention shooting that appeared to follow the movement of people on the run,” read one such statement from MSF.

So flagrant was the targeting, MSF, and human rights groups around the globe intimated the U.S. was likely guilty of committing a war crime. In fact, that the 16 military servicemen responsible for the attack have been handed the equivalent of a wrist slap over the apparent mistake, it’s arguable whether the U.S. has taken full responsibility.

According to the Times, the military members “believed they were targeting a separate building several hundred yards away where several Taliban fighters were supposedly hiding.”

That explanation, in itself, appears suspicious, considering, as MSF has repeatedly explained, all sides in any conflict where MSF operates are given precise GPS coordinates of their facilities — specifically to prevent such a grievous error. In fact, just prior to the Kunduz hospital bombing, MSF had resent those coordinates to the U.S. — from just outside the facility’s front door.

“The gravity of harm caused by the reported failures to follow protocol in Kunduz appears to constitute gross negligence that warrants active pursuit of criminal liability,” asserted Donna McKay, executive director of the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, in a letter to the White House cited by the Times.

In the days and weeks following the bombing, the U.S. glaringly, repeatedly changed its explanation of what had taken place, as the Pentagon initially claimed it had no idea if it had even hit a hospital. Eventually, in November, Gen. John F. Campbell, then-commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, stated, the “cause of this tragedy was … avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures.”

This investigation by the Pentagon appears to confirm its own statement in the matter but offers little in the way of accountability for the deaths of 42 volunteers and civilians, nor the trauma of their families and those who survived.

Incidentally, the U.S. opportunistically and quietly took responsibility for the bombing in the wake of the attacks on Brussels, Belgium.

MSF has decided to refrain from commenting on this latest report, pending an announcement by Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, slated for Friday. Some 3,000 pages of (likely heavily) redacted information from the Pentagon investigation will follow that official statement.

Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.